The 24-Hour Café

by Libby Page

The woman shakes her head.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘Well, we do both have new jobs, but that’s not why we’re leaving. We’re just sick to death of London.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Mona says again, not knowing what else to say. Although she might have fallen for Paris herself, she can’t imagine that she’ll ever stop loving London. It has been her home for twelve years and although it has grown so familiar that she doesn’t always notice everything about it any more, she still loves it. She thinks that she probably always will. And as she thinks it, it hits her again that she will be leaving. She’d been so excited about the new start and so desperate to get away from the stress and unhappiness that had grown over the months in the flat, that she hadn’t thought in detail about saying goodbye to the city she calls home.

  ‘Yeah!’ says the man, even more enthusiastically, ‘The rent prices!’

  ‘The underground,’ adds the woman.

  ‘The pollution,’ adds the man.

  ‘All them fucking pigeons.’

  ‘Leicester Square.’

  They don’t seem to be fully aware of Mona any more, and instead throw different things they hate about the city back and forth between them like shuttlecocks tapped over a net. As they go on, the list becomes more specific.

  ‘When a bus driver announces that “the destination of this bus has changed” midway through your journey without telling you where it’s changed to. Fucking what?’

  ‘Oh, oh, those restaurants where you can’t book a table so instead you have to queue and sometimes people even stand out in the rain and queue for hours.’

  Mona tries to interject. What about the view over Waterloo Bridge? she thinks. Even after all this time, whenever she catches a bus across it she puts down her phone to properly appreciate it, looking left and right to take in the view in either direction: the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and the London Eye in one direction, and St Paul’s, the OXO building and the soaring skyscrapers of the City in the other. She likes it best at sunset when Big Ben is silhouetted against a peach sky, the buildings are washed in gold and the lights from windows reflect on the river. What about the fountains at Somerset House and Granary Square where children run through the water, screaming and laughing, their parents watching from the side with dry clothes, complete strangers beaming at the joyful, innocent sound? What about Broadway Market, which comes alive every Saturday with food stalls, the smell of Thai curry and fresh doughnuts wafting into the air as people push bikes through the crowds and buskers (really good ones, too) sing and strum on guitars? The fact that you can wear anything you like and be whoever you want to be here without judgement, she thinks, glancing again at the male customer in the dress. And the theatres – the big ones of course but also all the tiny ones crammed into stuffy rooms above pubs where you can often catch an amazing new show for a tenner. But the couple are on a roll.

  ‘The Circle Line!’ says the man.

  ‘Oh god yes, the Circle Line!’ says the woman.

  They both start laughing.

  Mona tries to find a laugh too but suddenly finds that she can’t.

  ‘What can I get you to eat?’ she says, perhaps a little more forcefully than she intends.

  The couple look up at her, back at each other and then down at the menu.

  ‘Bangers and mash!’ says the man, folding the menu and handing it to her.

  ‘Umm, scrambled eggs on toast!’ says the woman.

  ‘OK,’ says Mona, turning towards the kitchen.

  As she leaves, she hears the man continuing the conversation.

  ‘Oh, what about the way people with backpacks don’t take them off when they’re on the Tube and so you end up getting knocked in the face by their bag.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and also …’

  Mona loses the sound of their voices as she approaches the kitchen, Aleksander’s radio taking over instead. She leans for a moment against the doorway. Her heart is pounding again. The couple are right of course; all the things they mentioned are things that Mona finds frustrating about her city too. But despite it all, she realises it has become what she had been looking for when she left Singapore when she was eighteen: a home. She has chosen to leave, and yet the impending reality of it all has only really just hit her. She had been so excited about the new start that she forgot that all beginnings are also endings.

  ‘Pound for the thoughts?’ says Aleksander and Mona looks up.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘I’ve got some orders for you.’

  She passes him the order sheet and he nods, turning back to the kitchen. Mona stays where she is as he starts to prepare the food.

  ‘What is it?’ he says after a while.

  Mona looks up again, startled. Aleksander usually keeps himself to himself – when she and Hannah chat about what’s going on in their lives and try to ask him questions too, he usually shrugs and returns to the stove.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she says.

  ‘Not nothing,’ he says as he cracks eggs into a bowl, ‘You look sad.’

  Mona laughs a little. Does she really look that bad? Evidently, if even Aleksander has noticed. She rubs her face, as though it might be possible to wipe away exhaustion and sadness.

  ‘I should have told you earlier,’ she says, ‘But …’

  ‘You’re leaving,’ he says matter-of-factly.

  ‘How did you know?’ she says.

  He shrugs and starts whisking the eggs ferociously.

  ‘Too good for here.’

  Mona feels herself blushing.

  ‘And also, Pablo told me. He overheard your argument with Hannah.’

  Mona feels herself growing hot. She thinks back to the fight with Hannah and recalls looking up and finding a café full of customers staring at her. Although she was surrounded by people, she’d never felt more alone.

  ‘So you’re not happy about the new job?’ Aleksander says, moving from the eggs to an onion gravy that he stirs on the hob. Mona turns briefly to check on the café but there are no new customers and everyone seems content enough. The couple have stopped talking now and are looking at their phones. The man in the floral dress selects a book from the telephone box library and starts to read.

  ‘I am happy,’ she says, turning back to face Aleksander, who grinds pepper with a flourish into the gravy, ‘It just hit me that I’m really going to be leaving. I’ve lived in London for so long. I feel at home here. And I know it’s expensive and polluted and crowded, and that I have chosen to leave, but I do love it too.’

  Aleksander doesn’t look up from the gravy, but he nods as she talks.

  ‘It’s where I’ve grown up, it’s where I’ve built my life,’ she says, ‘And I love it. I love that I know the way on the underground without having to look at a map. The metro map in Paris is so confusing. I bet I’m going to end up getting lost. I love the way people change in the summer and suddenly become lighter and happier. I love the old-fashioned terraced houses with lots of little chimneys …’

  Aleksander nods again.

  ‘I just know it so well, you know?’ she says.

  The pan suddenly hisses and bubbles dramatically as Aleksander fries the sausages, pushing them back and forth with a spatula, oil spitting in beads. Mona takes a deep breath. She can feel her eyes filling and she blinks quickly, desperate not to let herself cry. The move to Paris had felt like the right choice, but what if it doesn’t work out? She has only spent a weekend there, and now she is moving her entire life there. What if she hates it, or struggles to find her place?

  ‘You know,’ says Aleksander, ‘When I first moved to London from Krakow, I hated it.’

  Mona raises an eyebrow, surprised to hear him offering up such a personal piece of information. The most she knows about his personal life is that he supports Arsenal, like Pablo. Aleksander continues looking at the pan as he speaks.

  �
��So grey! People always in a rush. No manners. Tesco – full of different foods and not my favourite things. Lonely all the time, no friends, living in a small flat with three other men, two from Poland, one from Russia.’

  Mona listens carefully, absorbing each new piece of information and trying to use it to paint a picture of Aleksander’s life that she has never seen before. He turns down the heat on the sausages and fetches a new pan for the eggs.

  ‘But then it got better,’ he says, ‘I found Polish supermarket near my flat – so many of my favourite stuff and like I was home again. And the local Wetherspoon’s – my flatmates met there every weekend and I came too and met new people. Still go there for the football, for beers … I have local pub and a better flat and now I am happy. Same thing for you when you move to new city.’

  It is the most Mona has ever heard Aleksander say. She is glad that he is focused on the food because she knows she would struggle to hide her surprise. For someone who has said so little to her in the past, he has managed to find the exact words she needs to hear.

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ she says.

  He hands her the two plates: bangers and mash and scrambled eggs on toast. Then he turns away, as though signalling that the conversation is over and that he has better things to be doing. Mona watches for a moment as he turns up the radio and noisily starts unloading the dishwasher. Then she carries the steaming plates through to the couple in matching jeans, thinking about what Aleksander has just said.

  ‘Thanks,’ says the woman as Mona places down the plate.

  ‘Rudeness!’ says the young man loudly, raising his hand as though answering a question and nearly knocking the second plate out of Mona’s hand, ‘That’s another thing I won’t miss about London.’

  He doesn’t look at Mona as she places his plate on the table; instead he picks up his knife and fork and starts eating immediately.

  Aleksander

  ‘You’re never going to be one of life’s shouters,’ he remembers his mother saying to him when he was a child. ‘You’re just a quiet person, not a chatter. That’s just who you are.’

  He’d hoped that as he grew older he might prove his mother wrong. But he hadn’t. She had put him in a box at the age of ten and he had never managed to climb out of it. Over time he had instead grown to fit it exactly.

  As he cooks, he thinks with embarrassment back to the earlier conversation with Mona – the longest conversation they’d had, probably, since they’d been working together. When he speaks to her he feels like he is fishing for words but catching only silence. He feels foolish, which is why he usually chooses to say nothing instead.

  It isn’t helped by the fact that he is in love with her. He has been in love with her since they started working together. She joined the café two weeks after him and until he met her he never thought it was possible to fall in love with someone straight away. But when she walked through the door, her long dark plait resting on her shoulder and her body moving with such … He searches for the word and eventually finds it. Grace. She moved with grace. He knew straight away what was happening because two words were screaming at him inside his head: ‘Oh fuck.’

  He knew straight away that he loved her but he also knew straight away that it was impossible. Just like he knows he isn’t a chatter, he also knows he isn’t a lover. He has never had a proper girlfriend. He still lives with his two Polish friends, now in a better flat (the Russian has since moved in with a girlfriend) and when he isn’t working he spends most of his time playing computer games with his flatmates, reading and watching videos on YouTube. He doesn’t know many girls. He doesn’t understand them. Sometimes he listens in on Mona and Hannah’s long conversations with each other and has no idea what they are talking about (and by now his understanding of English is pretty good). They sometimes probe him for comments or advice but he says nothing because he can think of absolutely nothing to say. Eventually they turn back to each other and he turns back to his kitchen, taking comfort in the fact that at least here he knows what to do. He isn’t even sure that he particularly likes cooking – he certainly doesn’t love it – but at least in the kitchen he feels safe and in control.

  Carefully, he pours the batter into the pan and watches patiently, waiting for exactly the right moment to flip the pancakes, when bubbles are starting to form on the surface, but not too many. Flip, wait, flip. Then he plates them up and brings them to the front for Mona.

  ‘Table three,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks,’ she replies with that smile, but he has already spun around and returned to his kitchen.

  As he clears up and starts on the next order he thinks about the conversation again. He isn’t quite sure why he snapped today and actually spoke to her. Perhaps because she is leaving, so it doesn’t really matter any more if he makes a fool of himself. Or maybe because she looked so sad, sadder than he had ever seen her, and it made him feel like his heart was being squeezed. And even if he knew he was likely to choose the wrong words, he suddenly, desperately, wanted at least to try to find some.

  She had looked so surprised that he knew immediately that he had said the wrong thing. He persevered anyway, because, having started, he found it hard to stop. And now here he is again, alone in his kitchen thinking of her and loving her.

  Mona hadn’t even noticed him arriving today. He stood in the café, waiting to say hello to her but she was staring so fixedly into space – her dark eyebrows scrunched in one of her many expressions he knew so well – that he gave up and headed straight into the kitchen instead. That’s when Pablo told him about the argument, and that Mona was leaving. Aleksander suspected Pablo had long ago guessed how he felt, because he placed a hand on Aleksander’s shoulder and patted him.

  Mona is leaving. The fact hits him again and he blinks quickly, telling himself it is just the pepper he has been adding to a macaroni cheese. He tries to comprehend it – what the café will be without her. He knows he will still see her everywhere, hear her soft voice with its unusual accent – almost American but not quite. To him, the café is Mona. But there is also a part of him that is pleased – a bittersweet sort of pleased – because loving her means he wants her to be happy. And he knows that dancing makes her happy: you just have to look at her as she walks between the tables or stretches to dust the pictures or holds the door open for a customer, to know that she is not a waitress, she is a dancer.

  He suddenly curses to himself, a steady stream of Polish swearwords. The ironic thing is, although he finds it so hard to talk to other people (particularly women, particularly Mona), often he catches himself talking to himself. It’s as though each human has a certain number of words they need to use up each day, and as his are not dispensed on conversations with other people, he has to get them out somehow and this is the only way. Mona has caught him at it before and he knows she must think him mad because of it. He thinks he is mad because of it.

  He forces himself to stop talking to himself and chances a peek out the kitchen window, wondering if Mona has heard him. But she is facing away, serving a young man and a woman Aleksander assumes is his girlfriend. She hands them two coffees and then returns to the counter, leaning against it and looking out across the café. Aleksander knows that both Hannah and Mona spend a lot of their shifts watching the customers that come in. Sometimes he catches them talking about some of them in the brief moments when the café is completely empty. As Mona watches the customers, Aleksander watches Mona.

  Mona

  The man in the floral dress has been joined by an old woman in a yellow beret that she has not removed despite the warmth of the café. Mona isn’t sure whether they know each other (his mother, perhaps?) or have just happened to start talking, but they seem intent in conversation and every now and then they both laugh. Their laughter joins that of the women who just arrived and now sit in a large group, two tables pushed together. They speak in a language Mona guesses is Scandi
navian, although she couldn’t say which language exactly. Nearby, an Asian couple hold hands across their table. The woman has a large birthmark on her cheek and Mona spots an engagement ring sparkling on her hand.

  Suddenly, everywhere Mona looks she seems to see love. Sometimes the café is dominated by anger as a couple have a heated argument or one customer bumps into the other and spills their coffee. Other days there seems to be such a mix of emotions that it is impossible to pick out one over another. But right now as Mona sees it, the feeling is love. It takes different shapes – the interlocked hands of the couple, the loud conversation of the group of friends – but it is there. And as she watches, she comes to a sudden realisation. She may not have a boyfriend but it is not true that she hasn’t had a partner, or that she has never experienced love. It’s just that the great love story of her life so far hasn’t been a romance – it’s been a friendship. She is hit with a sudden sharp pain as she accepts that it might be over. The pain cuts through her as sharply as grief, a sense of loss rocking her. She grips the coffee bar tightly, holding herself up, holding herself together.

  10.00 p.m.

  Dan

  The warmth of the café welcomes him as he opens the door and steps back inside. It is much busier than when he left this morning (although the morning seems a long time ago), but he spots a table near the back and sits down, taking off his backpack and tucking it under the chair. He nods up at the stuffed bear, prepared this time for his staring eyes and outstretched claws.

  The red-headed waitress is not here; instead Dan spots the dark-haired one whom he remembers seeing when he first arrived early this morning. Her hair hangs in a plait and she stands behind the counter, holding on to it with both hands. Also in the café are a couple a little older than him who sit opposite each other at a small table, a man in a floral dress who talks to an old woman wearing a yellow beret, a group of women in their thirties who talk loudly to one another in what Dan guesses is a Scandinavian language, and an Asian man in what looks like some sort of security guard uniform who holds the hand across the table of a pretty woman with a large birthmark on her cheek.